Biblyon Broadsides

As of this morning, all of the older articles on the Biblyon Broadsheet have been moved to the new format. Any links you have to blog posts, topics, and categories should continue to work; they’ll be redirected to the new URLs. If you see a problem, let me know.

The only links that won’t work are direct links to the images in my image library. I’m considering redirecting all of the old images to an advert that supports my politics. If you’re mooching off of my bandwidth, you might want to stop. You can convince me not to do this by actually linking to an article that contained the image, something no one is currently doing except one page proudly advertising itself as an image ripper. Of course, if you’re using images from my site without reading the articles, you also aren’t reading this. I hope you enjoy gun-toting hippies.

For those of you that care about that sort of thing, the new site is built off of Django. That will make it more flexible than the hacked-together (though useful for its lifespan) system I had been using. For those of you who don’t care about such things, expect more pictures and perhaps even video if I see something cool on YouTube.

This is part of what I love about the old-school ethos. I was browsing through Pegasus #12 today, looking for adventure ideas for what happens after the current adventure and before the player characters reach their destination, and I ran across this very old-school spell: Disbelieve Reality.

If the recipient misses his Save vs. Magic, the caster is able to convince him of the illusionary nature of any one real item. This will allow the victim to walk through walls, over pits, etc. Only one thing may be disbelieved. It must be a well-defined item but may be as complex as “the attacking army.” The spell lasts as long as the disbelieved item remains in visual contact.

Besides requiring that the target fail their saving roll for it to take effect, the target is required to make an Intelligence roll every round (which, remember, is a minute long in AD&D). If they roll lower than their intelligence on d20, they no longer disbelieve, and, like Wile E. Coyote, fall into the gorge. The smarter they are, the more likely they are to hold up that ACME sign.

Just as in real life, people find it easier to fool themselves than to fool others. The caster need only roll 1d10 (illusionists) or 1d12 (magic-users) less than or equal to their level to continue disbelieving reality. Since it’s a third level illusionist spell or a fifth level magic-user spell, that’s not going to be difficult.¹

The spell requires speaking, motioning, and a material component. The material component is at least ten cubic feet of smoke or cloud. Poof! A big cloud of smoke, cast the spell, and reality is unreal.

Range is touch, and the casting time is one round.

Remember that in Gods & Monsters, you’ll have to estimate spell level by doubling the D&D level; it’s probably a seventh or eighth level spell. And since rounds are only ten seconds, I’d say that the Intelligence roll need only be made every minute. And the Reaction roll would be against Reason. They’ll need to fail a Reason roll in order to disbelieve reality.

I would probably make it a spirit manifestation instead. It’d be a good effect for Chaos and Trickster spirits. Call it Maya, Moksha, or Pierce the Veil, and give a true bonus to the roll of the target’s Wisdom as a major contributor. So that, while Intelligence hinders the character’s ability to achieve Moksha, Wisdom helps.

I’ve been writing the rule books in Word. It generally has sucked, but it was the only choice. About a year ago, a new version of Nisus Writer Pro added outline navigation; Word’s outlining was the only reason I was sticking with it. Since then, all new documents have been created with Nisus; given the long lead time I have, you haven’t seen any of them yet.

But I have updated The Adventure Guide’s Handbook, and have just finished updating The World of Highland Guidebook. Using Nisus instead of Word makes it possible to include vector images (PDF and EPS) in the files and still have them be images on upload; it also means much cleaner HTML, which in turn means being able to use the new CMS to display them.

The new version is mostly the same. The big change is that I’ve updated the maps as well. I redrew them in Inkscape as all one image, and use clipping boxes to get the part of the map I want for each section of the guidebook. Since I was redrawing the map, I also put in the parts to the west and to the south that I’d never gotten around to redoing on a computer. You’ll also notice a huge unknown square in the upper left—that’s a piece I never got around to, period. I have no idea what’s up there. Except that it’s cold.

The source files for the maps and other images are in the ZIP Resources for The World of Highland Guidebook.

The opening text about the evils of kings—from which comes the title of this post—is from Samuel in the King James version of the Bible. I’ve changed it a little here and there to reflect the lack of any surviving Bibles in Highland—and the fact that the King James Bible wasn’t written until 600 years after the Cataclysm, which means it was never written at all in Highland. At the time of the Cataclysm, there were no complete English-language Bibles. For that matter, English itself wasn’t recognizable as modern English at the time of the Cataclysm. It’s a convenient fiction that the language developed similarly following the destruction and re-arranging of the world. It makes riddles a whole lot easier.

You have to wonder about the wisdom of the elders, who, seeing that Samuel’s sons were prone to bribery, corruption, and bad judgement, decided what they really needed was a king to replace non-hereditary prophets.

Robert J. Kuntz—yes, that Rob Kuntz—writes about the gaming style in the early days, in which player knowledge and ingenuity played a much greater role.

“Immersive play furthers creative thought. When a player substitutes intuition and creativity for game mechanics only, they are not immersing themselves in a growing experience through which they become better decision makers or strategists. This very lack summons a ground of clay that makes any stance for learning or achieving beyond a redundant and non-immersive pattern impossible. Such participants instead comfortably root to where and when they will choose to implement powers and repeatable strategies. They reach for dice with the knowledge that they have achieved a numerically advantageous position as they have before them all of the inputs in print to arrive at that calculation, so they are assured in most respects of a positive outcome. This is like opening a door. It takes little thought or planning. It is in a word boring; but the consequences for those who limit play under such a premise is more than just boring, it’s frightening.”

What words has Dungeons & Dragons brought to the English language?

“The first occurrence of *magocracy in print, anywhere, as far as I have been able to determine, is on page 89 of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide (1979), by Gary Gygax, in a list of forms of government. Many of the terms on my own list of governmental types are found there, naturally, such as gynarchy, oligarchy, and theocracy.”

I’ve been ignoring the Biblyon Broadsheet because the means of entering new articles and links isn’t nearly as easy as for the other sites on my server. So now I’m moving the Broadsheet into the new format.

All links should continue to work; whenever a portion of the site gets moved, I’ll make sure that old requests get redirected to the new URL. Eventually all of the old articles will be moved into the new site. I’ve already done this once before with Mimsy so it shouldn’t be too hard.

The new format will make it easier for me to make quick links to articles on the burgeoning old-school net. It will also make it easier to link to Youtube videos if any game-related ones cross my path.

It also will automatically use whatever commenting system I use on the rest of the site; currently that’s JSKit, but I am toying with the idea of making a custom system that does exactly what I want.

For the computer geeks, the new Broadsheet is built off of a custom CMS I wrote using Django (and Python). It’s the same CMS I use for Mimsy Were the Borogoves and Negative Space.

Welcome to Biblyon, scholar!

The latest Fight On! is out—issue 7. Look on page 29 for Song of Tranquility by yours truly. There’s a great drawing by Mark J. Allen of a frozen mountainside covered in dead things. I made the maps in Inkscape, so if you want to play around with the maps, I’ve uploaded them here as Inkscape files.

If you order over the holidays, enter HUMBUG for a 10% discount. (Update December 13: I just heard that HOHOHO gives a 20% discount.)

This issue looks like a lot of fun, as usual. I haven’t read it through yet, but if you buy it for one thing buy it for the Mutant Future Wandering Harlot table.

BTW, speaking of old-school, while looking up old Dragon authors recently I discovered that I have an entry on Acaeum too, for the three Dragon Magazine articles I managed to get accepted back in the eighties. (Fortunately, Dragon rarely included author photos.)

If you’re looking to bundle up your purchases to save on shipping, also consider The Story Games Names Project and Stonehell Dungeon. I’ve already talked about the Names book; I finally ordered a copy myself about a week ago, and it arrived on Monday.

Stonehell is interesting. It’s very much the old-school, specifically Judges Guild, style of short, simple, tiny entries per encounter area. There is no flavor text. Normally I’m not a big fan of that style, as much as I enjoy reading the adventures, I can’t run them. But Michael Curtis takes this style and combines it with the one-page-dungeon style to make it much more useful. He provides a complete overview of each section on two facing pages, making it easy to see what’s going on in that area. When the players reach a new area, you need only take a short break to re-read the two-page description and then to re-read the two-page map/key.

Each level has two facing pages describing the overall level, with shrunken versions of the maps for that level. Again, all on just two pages. Each level is divided into separate areas. Each area consists of a two-page overview, and a two-page map and key. The overview contains the basic premise of that area of the dungeon, as well as any special creatures and magic items.

Congratulations, Mr. Raggi.

To everyone else: buy his books. I see Noble Knight has Green Devil Face #3 in stock finally, so I’ll be ordering that, the Grinding Gear, and No Dignity in Death.